THE INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE company Cloudflare, which provides a variety of performance and security services to millions of websites, revealed late Thursday that a bug had caused it to randomly leak potentially sensitive customer data across the internet.

The flaw was first uncovered by Google vulnerability researcher Tavis Ormandy on February 17, but could have been leaking data since as long ago as September 22. In certain conditions, Cloudflare’s platform inserted random data from any of its six million customers—including big names like Fitbit, Uber, and OKCupid—onto the website of a smaller subset of customers. In practice, it meant that a snippet of information about an Uber ride you took, or even your Uber password, could have ended up hidden away in the code of another site.

For the most part, the exposed data wasn’t posted on well-known or high-traffic sites, and even if it had been it wasn’t easily visible. But some of the leaked data included sensitive cookies, login credentials, API keys, and other important authentication tokens, including some of Cloudflare’s own internal cryptography keys. And as Cloudflare’s service spewed random information, that data was being recorded in caches by search engines like Google and Bing and other systems.

“Because Cloudflare operates a large, shared infrastructure, an HTTP request to a Cloudflare web site that was vulnerable to this problem could reveal information about an unrelated other Cloudflare site,” Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming explained in a blog post on Thursday. The leak did not expose the transport layer security keys used in HTTPS encryption, but it does seem to have potentially compromised data protected in HTTPS connections. And while Graham-Cumming added that there’s no indication in Cloudflare’s logs or elsewhere that bad actors had taken advantage of the flaw, looking for leaked data that hasn’t yet been scrubbed has become something of an internet-wide scavenger hunt.

The good news is that Cloudflare acted quickly to address the bug. It pushed a preliminary fix less than an hour after learning about the issue, and permanently patched the flaw across all its systems around the world in under seven hours. But while the company has worked with Google and other search engines to scrub caches and rein in the exposed data—so that people can’t just run searches to find and collect sensitive information from the leak—the fallout remains.

What Happens Now

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says that only clients who have certain HTML on their sites and were using a particular set of Cloudflare settings—3,000 customers in total—were triggering the bug while it was active. The data that leaked out and was deposited on their sites could come from any Cloudflare customer whose data happened to be in server memory at that particular moment. Prince says that so far Cloudflare is aware of 150 of its customers whose data was impacted in some way. “It’s obviously very serious for us, and it’s very serious for our customers, but for the individual WIRED reader the chances of this impacting them is relatively minimal,” Prince says. “We don’t like screwing up. It hurts. I don’t want to downplay the severity of this. It was a very bad bug.”

To mitigate whatever risk does remain, security researcher and former Cloudflare employee Ryan Lackey suggests changing every password for every online account, since the “Cloudbleed” leak could have exposed anything. “It’s coming out of a universe of all possible data that went through Cloudflare in the past six months, so there’s a lot of potential data,” says Lackey. “But the odds of any given piece of data being in there are very low.” Taking standard security hygiene measures like updating passwords and enabling two-factor authentication is always the best first line of defense. And since this Cloudflare bug has such unpredictable results, it’s smart to protect yourself even though you may not have been specifically exposed.

Some Cloudflare customers can also rest easier than others. For example, AgileBits, which makes the popular password manager 1Password, reassured its users on Thursday that none of their secrets, including the master password at the core of each account, could have been exposed by the bug. “We designed 1Password with the expectation that SSL/TLS can fail,” wrote AgileBits product security officer Jeffrey Goldberg. “Indeed it is for incidents like this that we deliberately made this design.”

For data traveling in plain text, though, the leak has real repercussions, especially if bad actors discovered it before Ormandy did. Then again, it may not have been worth the hassle.

“I’m not sure it’s the most productive way to attack a given site,” says Lackey. “I think there are a lot of easier ways to attack almost everything. And it’s not a really good targeted attack against a specific user.”

For now, the debacle’s major significance is a dramatic reminder that internet infrastructure and optimization services like Cloudflare may offer stronger and more resourced security protections than the average website would probably implement on its own, but that convenience also creates a different type of large-scale risk.

“The problem is Cloudflare is such a big target that if it were seriously compromised it would be a potentially internet-destroying thing,” Lackey says. “The real impact of this [incident] is it shows how critical Cloudflare has become on the internet.”

Initial expert reactions are that the data seems legitimate and will create deep problems for the CIA on many fronts. The leak has the potential both to undermine the organization’s ability to carry out offensive intelligence gathering and to damage its international public perception. The leak exposes CIA capabilities and tools like unpatched iOS and Android vulnerabilities, strategies for compromising end-to-end encrypted chats (though not undermining the encryption itself), bugs in Windows, and even the ability to turn Samsung smart TVs into listening devices.

“From what I can tell, this seems to be legitimate,” says David Kennedy, CEO of TrustedSec, who formerly worked at the NSA and with the Marine Corps’ signals intelligence unit. “It shows expansive capabilities of the CIA and divulges NSA tools as well. But a lot of it seems to be missing, as far as direct codebase used for these.” WikiLeaks says it redacted much of that more specific information.

Those redactions, in part, make it difficult to ascertain just how comprehensive the leaked information is. In spite of WikiLeaks’ claims, it is only a small fraction of the CIA’s total arsenal. WikiLeaks itself has said it will release additional CIA data dumps in the future.

“I don’t think that this is everything. It likely represents a very limited view of the overall network exploitation program,” says Jake Williams, founder of the threat intelligence firm Rendition Infosec. The WikiLeaks dump includes no mention of iOS 10, for instance, an operating system that has been on the market for months. “But there’s a lot here, and it’s likely going to be very damaging to US international relations.”

Given the polarized political climate in the US, and President Donald Trump’s recent feudswith the intelligence community, the leak highlights a tension between the importance of checking intelligence overreach and the need to maintain US defense and intelligence-gathering capabilities abroad. It also keeps WikiLeaks once again at the center of a potential firestorm—one that will likely disrupt the CIA’s operations.

“Who knows how it got leaked,” Kennedy says. “But honestly, if I were a foreign nation and published this, I would think that this could completely reduce our capabilities abroad.”

Disclosing software vulnerability spy tools hinders intelligence organizations because it gives manufacturers the opportunity to patch their code and close the backdoors that allowed spies access. Protecting users necessitates that process, as does the reality that intelligence groups can’t ensure that some malicious actor isn’t also using an active exploit. If the CIA can get into a device, so can a blackhat hacker.

During the Obama administration, the White House worked to create the Vulnerabilities Equities Process, which attempted to create a framework the intelligence community could use to motivate disclosure of as many vulnerabilities as possible while still allowing agencies to retain some undisclosed zero-day vulnerabilities when they concluded it was in the public interest. The CIA leak appears to validate criticism that the process lacks transparency and doesn’t achieve its goals.

“We were [estimating] the total arsenal of zero days was in the dozens, and that was for everyone, including NSA,” says Jason Healey, a cyber-conflict researcher at Columbia University. “So if you find dozens in here alone, then that means we only guessed part of the total.”

Adam Conover can probably answer any question you throw at him, but try asking him to list his favorite episodes of the first season of “Adam Ruins Everything” and he stumbles.

“It’s so hard for me to choose between my babies,” says Conover, who created and stars in the show. “There are so many that I love. The ones I gravitate most towards, honestly, are the ones that have the strongest stories behind them, in addition to the information.”

It was tough, but he narrowed it down to five (of 27) episodes, but not in any particular order. They’re listed here in the order they aired.

“Adam Ruins Forensic Science,” (Season 1, Episode 4)

“I love that we do sort of a ‘CSI’ parody, which was really fun to do,” Conover says. “The three topics — polygraph tests, eye-witness testimony and fingerprinting — are things people believe are absolutely foolproof. Like there’s such a thing as a lie detector! They believe it because they see it TV.” The real-life implication comes when people have jury duty and believe that fallible evidence is infallible. “It was a really satisfying set of misconceptions to take down,” he adds.

“Adam Ruins Death,” (Season 1, Episode 12)

“I like it because it’s a real twist on our normal concept,” Conover says. “If you ask people, ‘Hey, are you going to die one day?’ they’re like, ‘Yeah, of course I will.’ But they haven’t really internalized it or thought about it. They’re in denial. This episode shows why that’s such a harmful point of view.” Conover, who loves that this is the first episode where his on-air alter-ego can’t learn his way out of an issue, says the episode was profoundly influenced by Atul Gawande’s book “Being Mortal.”

“Adam Ruins Hollywood,” (Season 1, Episode 13)

“Another one I really love is our Hollywood episode,” Conover says of an admittedly lighter episode that covers awards season, movie ratings and reality TV. “I think the audience really latched onto that one because of how enjoyable it is to peek behind the curtain. I believe very deeply that learning how something is done doesn’t ruin it; it makes it better because you have a whole new level to work on. You can watch an awards show and say, ‘They campaigned really hard for that Emmy this year.’”

“Adam Ruins Immigration,” (Season 1, Episode 18)

“This episode is one of the ones we’re all proudest of. It was our first time doing anything remotely topical,” he says. Instead of focusing on the cost or impracticality of building “The Wall,” Conover and crew viewed it from a fresh perspective. “We found in researching that, actually, the problem was it would INCREASE the number of undocumented people living in this country because that’s what border enforcement has always done. I’ve very proud of that episode, but I didn’t write the story. One of our writers, Gonzalo Cordova, did. I found it very moving.”

“Adam Ruins Prisons,” (Season 1, Episode 21)

“We feel really passionately, on the staff, that mass incarceration is one of the biggest problems facing America today. And it’s largely an invisible problem because it’s one that we, by design, keep far from the rest of society,” Conover says. In a twist, the goal wasn’t to offer the audience information about the penal system, but to make viewers feel its effect on people. “Also, the expert we had on that episode, Daryl Atkinson — a formerly incarcerated fellow who’s a civil-rights attorney now — is one of my favorite people we’ve had on the show. He does really incredible work, and his story is also incredible.”

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